Chirognomy Versus Chiromancy

D'Arpentigny drew a distinction that structures Western palmistry to this day: chirognomy, his own contribution, reads the hand's shape, proportions and the texture of its surface as signs of temperament and general aptitude, while chiromancy, the much older tradition he did not originate, reads the lines crossing the palm as signs of specific life events and character traits. He treated his own shape based method as the more defensible of the two, describing it as closer to observation of visible physical type than to the more elaborate symbolic interpretation lines required, though he did not reject chiromancy outright and expected the two approaches to be used together.

This shape first, lines second structure became the standard organizing principle of the field after him, adopted explicitly by Desbarrolles and by nearly every English language palmistry manual that followed, including the widely read late Victorian works that introduced the practice to a mass audience. Modern palmistry retains no standing as an empirically validated method of assessing character or predicting events; the atlas records d'Arpentigny's system as the historically foundational classification it is, the point from which the field's later vocabulary and structure descend.